Question
Could humanity develop a planetary consciousness?
Answer
Short answer: no. I very much doubt it.
Structurally, functionally and behaviorally, speaking, this is already weakly true and has been for about 10,000 years. You can attribute a certain amount of input/output agency at a planetary level simply by virtue of self-organizing behavior that grows more coordinated and complex over time. It doesn't require magic, just certain patterns of feedback and information flow.
The big, intimidating word for it is autopoiesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut...
From Hobbes to Spencer, to (of course) Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis, this line of thinking has always been very popular. It goes back much further, but I trace the modern form of the argument to Spencer's The Social Organism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soc...
The problem is that something can be structurally, functionally and behaviorally "conscious" in an input/output sense, but that implies absolutely nothing about the existence of subjective consciousness in the sense of philosophy of mind.
When it is one human expressing philosophical skepticism about the proposition that another human is "conscious," we call it the philosophical zombie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi... )argument. It is useful for thought experiments, but nobody who believes in consciousness seriously believes other humans are philosophical zombies.
But at the level of a planetary consciousness, I think most people would say that the planet, even if it is I/O conscious, is a p-zombie consciousness.
Actually, I think even planetary self-awareness (which does not require consciousness, just the computational feature called intentionality) is probably not possible, but that's an empirical rather than metaphysical question. It may be possible to provide an account of examples of planetary behavior that can be interpreted as "intentional." It won't be as dramatic as The Happening, with plants releasing toxins to kill humans, but something of the sort is conceptually possible, without requiring consciousness, since it is a question about whether a certain kind of computer program can evolve naturally at a planetary scale.
Structurally, functionally and behaviorally, speaking, this is already weakly true and has been for about 10,000 years. You can attribute a certain amount of input/output agency at a planetary level simply by virtue of self-organizing behavior that grows more coordinated and complex over time. It doesn't require magic, just certain patterns of feedback and information flow.
The big, intimidating word for it is autopoiesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut...
From Hobbes to Spencer, to (of course) Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis, this line of thinking has always been very popular. It goes back much further, but I trace the modern form of the argument to Spencer's The Social Organism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soc...
The problem is that something can be structurally, functionally and behaviorally "conscious" in an input/output sense, but that implies absolutely nothing about the existence of subjective consciousness in the sense of philosophy of mind.
When it is one human expressing philosophical skepticism about the proposition that another human is "conscious," we call it the philosophical zombie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi... )argument. It is useful for thought experiments, but nobody who believes in consciousness seriously believes other humans are philosophical zombies.
But at the level of a planetary consciousness, I think most people would say that the planet, even if it is I/O conscious, is a p-zombie consciousness.
Actually, I think even planetary self-awareness (which does not require consciousness, just the computational feature called intentionality) is probably not possible, but that's an empirical rather than metaphysical question. It may be possible to provide an account of examples of planetary behavior that can be interpreted as "intentional." It won't be as dramatic as The Happening, with plants releasing toxins to kill humans, but something of the sort is conceptually possible, without requiring consciousness, since it is a question about whether a certain kind of computer program can evolve naturally at a planetary scale.